NetApp’s Cosmic Failures

A regular reader who recognizes that our team is very savvy about NetApp called me and asked if I knew about NetApp’s Cosmic Failures. I thought he meant Cosmic Features. But as I learned, he meant failures. He said that he had been ‘Netapped’ recently and was really tired of their sales puffery and marketing hyperbole, his terms were much more colorful. I listened to his story and asked him if he could send me a link or something that referenced this ‘Cosmic Failure’ thing . He explained to me that he could, but I could just search the Searchstorage site and find the reference.

Here is the link to the article and the paragraph that is so interesting .
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid5_gci1169744,00.html

Contacting NetApp about the problem, Campbell discovered that the company has a category of failures it refers to internally as “cosmic failures,” which are problems that it can’t, or won’t, fix. The failover detection fault the Salk Institute experienced was deemed a “cosmic failure,” and Campbell never heard from NetApp on the issue again.

Perhaps some of our readers , or some members of the toasters.mathworks.com group can provide us more detail on what these cosmic failures are and what causes them. I am certain that our readers would all appreciate the list of ‘NetApp Cosmic Failures’ and the workarounds that there are for them.

“The reason truth is so much stranger than fiction is that there is no requirement for it to be consistent” Mark Twain

You just can’t make this stuff up!